PathBreakers

Memphis is a city with serious momentum and serious ambition. Neighborhoods that were written off are being reinvested. Families who have been here for generations are choosing to stay and build. Leaders across sectors are making long-term bets on the city’s future — not just on downtown, but on the communities that have always been the real foundation of Memphis.  Memphis is growing. But who gets...

When a $6 billion bridge comes to your neighborhood, who decides what the residents get in return? Simone Sagovac and the community-elected Southwest Detroit Community Benefits Coalition have spent nearly 20 years ensuring that the answer is written by residents, not imposed by developers or government.  Southwest Detroit sits at one of the busiest freight crossings in North America. The Ambassado...

A commercial corridor in Detroit went from 10% occupancy to a thriving neighborhood hub–and they’re just getting started. In this episode, co-hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett talk to Caitlin Murphy about how one Northwest Detroit alliance is building opportunity block by block. Our Detroit arc continues with the long-term work of corridor revitalization. Murphy and Live6's work demonstra...

You can’t shape your neighborhood if you don’t know what’s happening to it.  In this episode, co-hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett talk to Orlando Bailey about how he runs a newsroom to build infrastructure for neighborhood power. They discuss: *Outlier Media’s innovative reader engagement and lead generating strategies like TXT OUTLIER and Detroit Documenters. *How Outlier has created an inf...

Season 2 of PathBreakers opens in Detroit — Kresge's hometown and a city whose comeback story has been told for a decade. But as hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennett note, that story has largely been written through the lens of downtown. The real test of Detroit's revival is whether neighborhoods share in it. In November 2025, Detroit voters made a decisive choice: by the widest margin in the ci...

Four American cities. Sixteen people working to improve where they live. One central question: Who has power to shape what happens in their city? In Detroit, New Orleans, Memphis, and Fresno, we talk with community leaders building neighborhoods of opportunity, reclaiming narrative power, and creating the conditions for families to thrive. And we sit down with city leaders to ask what it looks lik...

In this special season finale episode, hosts Tracey Pearson and Jamie Bennet welcome Kresge Foundation President & CEO Rip Rapson back to reflect back on the stories heard throughout the series and to share an exciting announcement about the future of Kresge. In this conversation, Rip also looks back on his journey to Detroit, reflecting on formative experiences and the influences his architec...

What is the purpose of an economy? What if economies were centered on people instead of money? What if everyone had access to both income AND wealth? These are the questions Dr. Darrick Hamilton works to problem-solve at the Institute on Race, Power, And Political Economy – an academic center he founded and directs at the New School in New York City, where he and his colleagues work to create “kno...

Dr. Beverly Wright has been working in climate and environmental justice since before the movement had a name. After 30+ years of leading groundbreaking community-based participatory research in her hometown of New Orleans, Dr. Wright is a celebrated pioneer of the field. Since 1992 she has been the visionary executive director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, the organization w...

After a challenging experience of her own as a low-income, first-gen college student, Dr. Bridget Burns understood that higher education was not “user-friendly” for everyone. And from that, her career mission became clear: transform colleges and universities into places where low-income, first-generation and students of color could not just navigate, but thrive. Dr. Bridget Burns is the CEO of the...

Cardell Orrin spent years as a high-level IT strategist and engineer. Now, as the executive director of Stand for Children Tennessee, he is “debugging” the processes by which parents and community members in Tennessee engage with their local school boards and state representatives. It’s a debugging that’s needed across America’s school systems.  In this conversation, Cardell reflects on a childhoo...

The natural topography and the social geography of Springfield, Massachusetts make it a place especially vulnerable to climate change. Samantha Hamilton is bringing Springfield residents together to develop climate solutions for their city.  Samantha Hamilton is the Director of Coalition Building and Community Engagement at the Public Health Institute of Western Massachusetts in Springfield, MA. I...

Quetzal Flores is a Grammy-winning musician who combines his immense creative skillset and his deep knowledge of cultural traditions to ignite community participation in resistance and resilience.   In this conversation, Quetzal recounts growing up “in movement” with parents who were deeply involved in the civil rights organizing of the Chicano Movement. He describes East LA's historical signi...

As a kid, Richard Burrell lived in the motels along Parkway Drive in Fresno, California. As an adult he founded and runs an organization that supports the wellbeing of the kids who live there now.  Richard Burrell is the founder and executive director of Live Again Fresno, a nonprofit after-school and community support organization that “co-powers” children and families in Fresno’s most vulnerable...

Dr. Mona Hanna, affectionately known as “Dr. Mona”, is best known as the pediatrician who exposed the Flint water crisis. She is also the associate dean for Public Health at Michigan State University and now the founder of RxKids – a cash prescriptions program for expectant mothers in Michigan and currently the largest cash-transfer program in the country. In this episode, Dr. Mona reflects on how...

Marcia Black is a Detroit-based archivist, curator, and cultural preservationist whose work focuses on preserving the histories of Black women, Black Detroit, and the Black radical tradition. Guided by her education at Marygrove College and inspired by her entrepreneurial grandmother who was a beauty salon owner, computer worker, and reverend, Marcia has dedicated herself to archival work with a p...

Damien Wilson is the Senior Director of the HBCU Brilliance Initiative at Reinvestment Fund, where he leads efforts to provide technical and financial support to Historically Black Colleges and Universities.  In this episode, Damien discusses how his career on Wall Street, his love for his hometown, and his own HBCU experience all inform his approach as a financial advisor working to ensure these...

Favianna Rodriguez is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and entrepreneur based in Oakland, California. She is the co-founder of The Center for Cultural Power. In this conversation, Favianna shares her journey as an artist and activist, discussing the influence of her immigrant parents, the challenges she faced in pursuing art, and the importance of cultural narratives in shaping po...

Elizabeth Birr Moje is dean, George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Education, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture in the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan. On this episode she describes the transformative arc of the Marygrove Learning Community in Northwest Detroit. The dialogue emphasizes the significance of purpose-driven lear...

Welcome to PathBreakers , a show from The Kresge Foundation all about the people who break through the noise, red tape, and all of the other obstacles to progress. In each episode,   you’ll meet a different Pathbreaker, people working in cities to forge new ways forward and discover the possibilities, sometimes hidden in plain sight.